Les Oulhamr fuyaient dans la nuit épouvantable. Fous de souffrance et de fatigue, tout leur semblait vain devant la calamité suprême: le Feu était mort.

Plausible is more like conceivable.

It’s possible that when I slam my hand on the table, it will go through the table, but it’s not plausible. We can’t imagine it actually happening, even though we know it can.

Visidata, maybe.

Watching the fire in the hearth, no?

The whole notion of “deserve” here is nothing more than a silly story we tell ourselves because other people teach us to believe it. It’s real, but you can change it. So maybe try changing it.

Instead of “I deserve a boyfriend” or “I don’t deserve a boyfriend”, try thinking “This is just a dumb story. It doesn’t mean anything. I either have a boyfriend or I don’t. That’s it.” Maybe it changes something in you. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it takes time and many repetitions. It doesn’t cost much to try.

Peace.

“Sorry, I can’t help you.” Why? Because sometimes I hand out random favors, but not today to you.

“summation” is also related to summary. All these words are related to reducing a collection of things to a single thing. A sum reduces a collection of numbers to its total. A summary reduces a collection of thoughts to its essence. A summation is effectively a synonym for a summary.

The word multiplication describes the operation applied to each pair of numbers. The word production would refer to the act of multiplying an arbitrary collection of numbers. Just as it would be for addition and summation.

It would fit the pattern.

Scrabble is not a language game, but instead a spatial and arithmetic game using arbitrary strings of letters. Don’t look to it as a reflexion of the state of English as she is spoke.

Thomas Dolby, I Love You Goodbye.

Thanks for that. Indeed, that makes me less confident in their suitability to teach those subjects, but I worry about a sensational conclusion about their general literacy.

I would want to repeat that study with novels written in the past 25 years before concluding too much. Yes, the participants had access to a dictionary, but I imagine that needing to decipher certain parts, such as foreign cultural references and familiar words with unexpected meanings, interferes with the brain’s usual functions for turning words into images in the mind’s eye. And this even ignores the folks with aphantasia like me.

Yes, although I’m struck by some of the words, particularly this sense of “wonderful”.

And now I’m even more glad that it’s sunny out here right now and I can hear birds.

Political discussions online rarely lead to satisfying resolutions. As a result, political discussions bleed into everyday discussion in the desperate hope that something, somewhere, will magically make sense.

Similarly, when businesses have meetings that don’t actually resolve matters, every meeting becomes a desperate chance to discuss things that matter in the hopes they’ll be resolved, so then every meeting that needs to happen will happen during every scheduled meeting, even wrhb ostensibly unrelated. This continues until meeting culture changes and even overall communication culture changes.

It seems natural and reasonable in such an environment for many people (like you) to want to disengage. Why continue doing something that never seems to lead to resolution?

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First, thank you for the thoughtful and detailed reply. I find it helpful.

Plain text accounting (and all the variants) sounds great, right until you need to use it to generate invoices, or depreciate assets, or do a monthly Business Activity Statement, or convert a currency, track repayments, etc.

All of those things require that you write software to achieve that, which means that now instead of solving problems and writing software for my clients, I’m burning hours writing software so I can run my business

Oddly enough, I feel the opposite: I’m so glad that I have the freedom to use other tools to do what I need and that I can simply write some custom software to achieve that. I always felt locked in by QuickBooks and now I can do anything from messing around in a spreadsheet to writing what I need with jq. Plain text as an interface means that the sky is the limit for flexibility.

It has also made my company’s financial information more accesible to me. Previously, I’d given it over to bookkeepers and accountants and only seen out of date financial statements when it was time to file taxes. Now I know what’s going on whenever I want.

It has also turned bookkeeping into a programming exercise, which made me more interested, not less. I don’t have clients waiting impatiently for me to produce features for them, so I can enjoy this wro instead of having it feel like a distraction.

I’ve been writing software for over 40 years and until last week I’d never heard of it. That’s not something you want in business software.

I feel that!

Because I’m still running a 25 year old accounting package that doesn’t run on current hardware, isn’t supported, doesn’t run under Linux and has all my data hostage.

Our motivations definitely seem compatible, even if our constraints and preferences don’t.

Thanks again. Good luck.

I’ve been using Plain Text Accounting for the past two years and have mostly enjoyed my experience. I’ve found hledger both well documented and well supported. I don’t know the space very well, so which applications and/or packages have you tried?

I speak a couple of languages in which there is no continuous present, but rather they use phrases such as “I sit and study Swedish” to mean “I’m studying Swedish (as in right now, that’s the task I’m doing)” or “I am in the process of reading a book”. They don’t change the form of the verb to highlight this continuous aspect, so perhaps they aren’t used to it.

Add to that that the continuous aspect in English is surprisingly complicated and arbitrary. If you try to nail down rules for how and when to use it, you might struggle. 😉 Folks struggling to use it correctly might be overcorrecting or merely confused.

There are, I’m sure, other reasons, but this is enough to account for some of what you’re seeing.

The distinction between simple past and past participle is disappearing in English more generally. I’m curious whether it will be considered quaint to distinguish them before I’m dead.

I suppose I don’t understand yet what you expect from a “relationship” that’s different from a friendship, so it’s hard to offer any advice.

If you want to have sex with someone, it helps to ask. I understand that asking has risks, so you probably want to have some sense that the other person is not going to hit you before you ask. 😉 I don’t know how to magically get them to ask you, except for maybe being generally sexually irresistible. That’s outside my expertise.

As you learn what you want, it will become easier to look for it and ask for it. Maybe it would help you to think more about what you want for now.

It’s not clear to me yet what you want: not too serious, but more than friends, so… sex? Not judging, just trying to understand. And maybe you don’t know yet.